


A Binary System

by musamihi



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Blindfolds, First Order Poe Dameron, Fraternization, Hero Worship, Loyalty, M/M, Multi, Oral Sex, Pre-Star Wars: The Force Awakens
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-28
Updated: 2016-08-28
Packaged: 2018-08-11 11:54:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7891039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/musamihi/pseuds/musamihi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Poe Dameron, raised from his earliest memories in the First Order's ascendency, nonetheless has a pretty shoddy grasp on <i>chain of command</i>.  When he defies orders one too many times - to resounding success, as always - all he can do is try to make his leaders understand: he's doing it for them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Binary System

**Author's Note:**

  * For [serenityabrin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/serenityabrin/gifts).



Below, on the surface of a harsh and nearly-airless moon, peace was settling like ash for the first time in days, the deathly silent fallout of the First Order's hard-won (and not at all preordained) success. A strategic foothold on the Entralla Route, quietly secured; the First Order's supply lifeline broadened, its incubation in the Unknown Regions accelerated. 

Above, in unmolested orbit, war raged in a wardroom. 

"You encourage him," Hux bit out, brittle but measured. "And you undermine me. He had his orders. He defied them. I know your understanding of chain of command snaps off at one link, but you'll just have to take my word for it that hierarchy is _fairly_ important to the operation of a military body in the -"

"He saved your life." Kylo Ren sounded bored, which meant he was amused. His spectrum of reactions to sharing close quarters with Hux had never broken into any shade as dispassionate as _bored._ "Does that really sound like my influence?"

In the shuttle's narrow main corridor, just outside the wardroom's locked door, Commander Poe Dameron heard none of this. His shoulders were loose and his jaw was set, a man ready to go down fighting - but there was a brooding note in the cast of his eyes to the deck, a dark and gentle tinge of self-reproach.

Minutes passed. The door hissed open, spilling green from the wardroom's tactical displays across Poe's polished boots. Kylo Ren strode out, the easy swing of his arms and his leisurely pace marking him as pleased. His mask faced straight ahead, but for a fleeting moment, before he turned the corner and disappeared, Poe felt Ren's eyes slide across him, a quick, cool stroke of approval. He knew very well the only reason he ever felt such things was because he was meant to. He straightened slightly, his chin tipping up to level; a muscle in his jaw eased enough to allow one corner of his mouth to rise. A warmth uncurled, swole within his chest.

The door remained open. Poe felt the pull of it like the lure of a snare.

"Commander," came his icy summons. Poe took the two paces into the wardroom pitched, like he was heading into gale-force winds. 

He came to a stop across from the place where General Hux was seated, not quite centered at the wardroom's table. He came to attention. "Sir."

"I have your report, Commander." Poe's eyes were fixed on a pulsing sensor panel some distance above Hux's shoulder, but it was easy enough to tell the man's gaze was locked on his datapad. "That will be all."

Poe stiffened, his whole body tensing; only his eyes moved toward the door. He'd prepared something to say, quite a _lot_ of something to say - he hadn't prepared for this. "Sir," he said, after a graceless hesitation. "Permission to -"

"Oh," Hux said, one finger scrolling breezily up the screen before him. "You _do_ know what permission is. Denied. You have the watch, Commander."

The gratification Ren's wordless praise had planted in him was gone. In its place there was only an explanation, a defense, a pledge and a profession burning behind his ribs like the need to shout. He had to say his piece, but his avenue had been cut off - his eyes dropped to Hux's face. He didn't move.

Something pinched in Hux's face as the silence hung between them. After a beat, he looked up; and his head made a slow, dangerous tilt to the side, like a weapon taking its careful aim. "You are dismissed," he said, stretching out the word as though the man in front of him might be too slow to catch its meaning if it wasn't spoonfed to him. 

Poe turned on his heel and marched out, his face a thwarted red.

* * *

Four hours later, their long and complex jump series back home having been plotted, vetted, and initiated, the shuttle's watch changed. The crew was minimal; perhaps a third of it had been left behind with the infantry company now manning their new base. The pilot who arrived to relieve Poe was tossing back a couple stim capsules even as he strapped himself in. Under normal circumstances, Poe might simply have pretended not to see - it would hardly have mattered if the man napped right through, as long as he was in the cockpit. They weren't scheduled to complete the first jump for another twelve hours, and if anything went wrong before that, well - no one would sleep through _that_.

These weren't normal circumstances. Poe hovered beside him, hunched under an instrumentation panel. "You got any more of those?"

A wary glance - the pilot couldn't decide quickly enough whether to try to look innocent. Poe could see the calculations working across his face. He paused for too long. "No, sir."

_Liar._ They were expensive; most things were scarce, back home. Hopefully this new outpost would start to change that, but it would take a while before the effects filtered down to his ranks. "Yeah. All right." Worth a shot. He took his leave, heading into the warren of passenger compartments. He ought to have gone to his bunk; he didn't intend to. Instead, he went straight back to the door of the main aft port-side cabin: Kylo Ren's quarters. 

The explanation he'd had prepared for General Hux was still aching inside him, a self-justification he felt a desperate visceral need to deliver - somehow, to someone. Yes, he'd had his orders as the ground mission had raged on around him. Yes, he had defied them, engaging before the signal he'd been explicitly ordered to wait for. And, yes, it had stood a chance of allowing the New Republic scientific forces they'd just replaced with First Order infantrymen to escape, or reach their communications equipment long enough to call for assistance. But the fact of the matter was: they hadn't. His impulsive decision had paid off. And if he hadn't made it, the odds were - he was convinced - that General Hux would be a black mark on the side of a crater on some moon no one had ever heard of. Poe had done the right thing; he knew that.

Unfortunately, he wasn't permitted to say it. There was one man who could plead his case, though - and that one, he'd already felt, was entirely in agreement with him. He stood before his door now, waiting. There was no need to use the intercom. Ren would know he was there, and he would admit him, or he would turn him away.

A few moments later, the speaker beside the door crackled. "Shut your eyes."

Poe blinked. "Sir?"

"Shut your eyes." His voice was flat, and oddly smooth.

Poe shut his eyes. The hiss of the door told him to step forward, and he did so carefully, not wanting to stretch his hands out and fumble his way around the personal effects of one of the soon-to-be-leaders of the reordered galaxy, but not exactly sure of an alternative - until an image of the cabin blossomed behind his eyelids, as though he were imagining it, but somehow more concrete. It was as it had been the last time he'd seen it, for inspections, spare and dimly lit and empty. The door slid shut behind him.

"What is it, Commander?"

The voice emanated from near the foot of the bed, although in his vision there was no one there - and it was a man's voice and nothing more, deep and perfectly recognizable but startlingly, unsettlingly alien, like seeing words backwards in a mirror. Poe very nearly spun around to turn his back, tugged by the kind of shock of distress he'd have felt if he'd walked in on the Supreme Leader naked in the shower.

"Sir -" He foundered; he snapped his mouth shut. "It can wait." He'd never seen Kylo Ren without his mask. Judging by the proliferation of rumors concerning what it hid - ranging from mere ugliness to an impossibly sophisticated droid to Vader himself reanimated - not many other people had, either.

"No. I called you in." He sounded - tired, Poe thought. Kriffing space, if he'd woken him up - "Tell me."

"Sir." He made a valiant effort to wrest his attention back to the matter at hand. This was important, it was beyond important, it was vital that he make it understood how much this meant to him - "Sir, I was hoping I could -" No, that hadn't been how he'd planned to begin this. What were the words? He felt like roughly ninety percent of his mental capacity was tied up in one idea: _don't open your eyes._ "I wanted to speak to you about today. About the general. Sir."

There was a quiet rush of breath, like a restrained sigh - and then padding footsteps, crossing spaces that in Poe's mind's eye were unoccupied. A rustling, slipping of fabric; and then an unmistakable looming presence behind him. Something soft settled across his eyes, darkening everything - it tightened as Ren knotted it at the back of his head, this strip of _whatever_ it was, his bare fingers slipping briefly into Poe's hair. The picture of Ren's quarters faded to black. "Better?"

_Not really_ , he thought, still decidedly off-balance, as though the ship itself were listing under him as Ren walked almost soundlessly around to stand in front of him again. But even as the intensely curious desire to see his face burned on, the discomfort that had heightened it - the fear that he might slip and open his eyes and see - subsided. He found his thoughts centering again. He drew in a breath, and let it linger deep inside him, and exhaled. He nodded. "Sir." _Sir, General Hux has had too much to see to after our mission to allow me to meet with him, and while I don't expect him to find the time, I was hoping …_ There it was. Relieved, Poe straightened. "Sir, General Hux -"

"You venerate him." Ren's interruption was slow, comfortable, unconcerned - as though it hadn't occurred to him it might not be respected.

It was also weighted down, somehow, the way words are when they come through a smile. Poe hesitated. He didn't understand; it didn't sound like a question. But then, it couldn't have been. "Yes." How was he supposed to answer that? Ren might have said, _stars give light._ "Of course, sir."

"It's not surprising. The training modules they put together, for the Stormtroopers and the officer corps - I've seen some of them, you know, when I couldn't help it. And he always scrapes together the time for that weekly address, doesn't he. I can hardly remember the last time I saw the banner flying _without_ his face in front of it -"

_"Sir."_ His blindness made him less conscious of the correctness of his own expression - never his strong suit to begin with. He was stunned; his brow knit with dismay. He wouldn't trip over his own words again, though. There was a spark of anger under his surprise that helped light his way. "My respect for my commanding officers doesn't come from watching holos. _Sir."_

"You sound insulted, Commander."

"I've served under him for years," Poe replied, doing his best to keep his voice driving forward, using his heated momentum to keep an angry tremor from revealing itself. "Just like I have under you. For years. I don't need anything but what I've seen with my own two eyes to know what kind of man he is. I'm not - he's not one millimeter smaller in person than he is on the fifty-meter display." Sure, the general had given some grand speeches - sure, he'd given them to some massive crowds, and there was no denying the effect it had, the way the amplified sound rolled over everything like holy thunder, the way everyone had to look _up_ , the way the standard behind him washed a sea of white armor in red. But that wasn't the source of his admiration any more than was Ren's lightsaber. "Sir," he added, a little too long after he'd shut his mouth.

"Insulted," Ren repeated with a slight drawl, as though he were turning it over in his hands. "And wounded."

"If that's what you think of me." There was no point in denying it - even if Ren hadn't been able to feel it, Poe would have gladly told him so. "Yes, sir. Any man worth anything would be."

"You shouldn't be, actually. What you feel for him …" It grew to almost painful proportions inside of him then, as though it were being summoned: reverence, faith, devotion. Love. "It's only possible because of what you are. You can't program this kind of thing with a training module - and believe me, he would just _love_ to. If you weren't so charmingly idealistic - no, don't look like that - it would be impossible. You can't knock it into someone's head. Believe me." His voice dropped; it was hard to tell whether it was dipping into bitterness, or mirth. "I would know." He paused, and for the first time, the silence was charged with something like hesitation. "I envy you, in a way. A small way, to be sure," he added, a little too rushed and a little too glib. "Things are so much easier for men like you."

Poe's face colored, at that. His cheeks, the bridge of his nose stung against the cool, rough cloth across his eyes. "This is not easy," he said, his chest tight, his voice strained to half a whisper - because he couldn't, he _couldn't_ shout at him. "I sit behind the lines, half the time, and I watch him - _you_ \- coming about this kriffing close to never, ever coming back, and most of the time there's not one damned thing I can do about it, and when there is?" He was seized with the unforgivable urge to reach up and seize off his blindfold; instead, he clenched his fists at his sides. "When there is, I _know_ it'll be a disappointment to him. I know it. And I hate it. Half the time you're gone, I want to rip my fucking hair out. Both of you."

It was as open as he'd allowed himself to be, with either of them, by far. His breath came too quickly; he tried to still the rise and fall of his chest. What reaction he'd expected, he didn't know - perhaps, at best, another dismissal - but the tips of Ren's fingers, tracing a slow, curious line across the flush over his cheekbones, along the ridge of his nose - that wasn't it. He started back at the unexpected touch, immediately silenced. Ren didn't pull his hand away until he'd finished his study - as though _he_ were the one feeling out the shape of someone's features for the first time, in the dark.

"Do you think," Ren said, low, and closer, "that your difficulties are comparable to mine? To his?"

Poe's heart gave a painful twist. He shut his eyes, his mouth pressing into a miserable line. That wasn't what he'd meant at all. The opposite, in fact. "No."

"And yet," Ren's tone was almost studious; intrigued. "You _do_ suffer." He sounded mildly surprised.

"All I wanted was to keep him safe." That was it - that was all he'd come here to say. To ask Ren to please, please tell him, just in case he'd listen.

"And you know how much he cares about _that_. If you had your way, Commander - tell me. What is it you think you want?"

"I'd keep you safe," he repeated at once, without hesitation, a touch of extra urgency in his voice because he'd just said that, hadn't he? "Both of you. You _are_ the First Order. And someone needs to care for you, because you sure as stars won't do it yourselves. That's what I want." He wanted it so badly; and it pained him all the more because he knew without being told that it wasn't what he _should_ want. 

"And you think yourself capable of that." When Poe was silent, his mouth clamped miserably shut, Ren went on: "It wasn't a rhetorical question, Commander. Or - it was, but maybe not the way you think. You _do_ think you're capable. Of most things, I imagine."

"If I were allowed, sir," Poe said, perfectly stubborn.

A quiet rush of breath: Ren sighing through his nose. "Well, at least you know you _should_ have some sense of your own limitations." His hands fitted themselves around Poe's jaw, pressing gently under his chin with his thumbs, tipping his face upward as though he were made of glass - and Poe didn't even flinch, this time. He stood stock still, pliant and immobile and thrilling from head to toe. There was absolutely nothing he wanted more than to come through this inspection and not be found wanting. His desire to see the face before him was so intense that for a moment he almost believed that he had - a flash of dark eyes, skin like ice and stone. "And you do well enough within them, I suppose," Ren went on, closer still, his breath brushing against Poe's mouth. "All your reprimands do follow a certain theme."

Ren kissed him - once, brief but unhurried, as though he were having a taste. Poe waited, his face turned up to it, expecting another, burning for it. It didn't come; and yet, the heat of his mouth was so close he could feel it on his lips. He sucked in a breath, he let it out, his mouth drew together to form a word, _please_ \- but instead, he stepped forward, raising his face to close the distance between them himself. His aim was slightly off; he found Ren's lower lip, and had to readjust, as his hands drew up to search out something to balance with. He found Ren's chest, and for an instant his hands shot back as though they'd been burned, the feeling of smooth, bare skin almost one surprise too many - but then he leaned into it, giddy with the solid warmth of his body and the careful, deliberate, investigative quality of Ren's hands on his face, the way he was kissing him like he was exploring some entirely new possibility. _Yes_ was running through Poe's mind, both victory and acquiescence. _Yes. See? I can. Yes._

There was even something strangely akin to laughter in Ren's voice when he spoke again. "What a tender thing you are," he said, and if it sounded more like he was examining some new species of insect than paying a compliment, Poe didn't care. "And you want to _take care_ of me." As though that were something perfectly ridiculous - as though Poe had told him he wanted to take him back in time, or give him the universe in a jar.

It was hard, Poe discovered, to pull off the cocksure routine he was accustomed to, when half his face was hidden. He gave it a try anyway. "Better than anybody ever has," he said, his lopsided grin running up against the blindfold - and his puffed-up bravado taking a bit of a hit when he moved forward another step, and almost tripped over what felt like a pile of clothes. Ren caught his arm and steadied him. "That's a promise."

And he didn't make promises he didn't intend to keep. Whether they were within his power or not, maybe he wasn't so great at sorting that out - it was just possible that sometimes, on occasion, he bit off more than he could chew. But he'd always managed it, up til now. He meant what he'd said: if he were only allowed to do what he knew he had to do, he could do them both so, so much good. When Ren's hand settled on his shoulder, bringing him to a halt, his sharply-focused hope almost dissolved into a flurry of uncertain fears; but then, standing there, alone, he heard a familiar soft, sinking sound as Ren sat on his bed, a slithering of fabric; he felt his hands at his hips, urging him down. And, kneeling, settling himself on the floor, feeling out his position as his shoulders brushed against the insides of Ren's knees, he felt some of his enduring pain leave him, like the acid sting of an overworked muscle dissipating in a moment of rest. One of them, at least, was willing to let him try. He slid his hands along Ren's thighs, slow not because he needed to find his way in the dark, but because he wanted to savor it. The deep, pleased little sound when he wrapped his hand around Ren's stiffening cock, he savored that, too; and the shudder and sudden sharpness of Ren's fingers in his hair when he first closed his lips, soft, warm, yielding, around the head. Every moan he elicited, every growl, stayed with him. And when he complied with the sharp, wordless dig of Ren's thumb in the soft place just above his spine, and sank onto him as far as he could manage, bending all his concentration to opening his throat around him, and Ren said _good_ , and said it again - he wasn't sure he'd ever been that happy. He clung to it; he did his utmost to make it happen again. And again. And again.

He stayed there on his knees, panting, when he was finished. Ren took his chin in his hand a moment later, and spent a minute or so meticulously - almost indulgently - cleaning his face with something soft. "Stand up," he said, and Poe pushed himself to his feet to let Ren straighten his uniform, brushing at his trousers and adjusting the hem of his jacket. Ren's hands settled at his waist, and gave a little push. "Turn."

Poe turned around, skimming the toe of one boot along the floor to keep his balance. Ren stood behind him, running his hands up Poe's back to rest on his shoulders; one of them continued up his neck, to the back of his skull, fingers spreading until his hand was twisted into his hair. He pushed gently forward. Poe shivered, and bowed his head, and felt Ren's breath hot against the bare skin of the back of his neck. 

"Shut your eyes."

He shut his eyes. His pulse was quickening. Every beat of his heart was another throb of arousal.

Ren slid his fingers under the back of Poe's blindfold, and slipped it off him. He pressed a kiss to the back of his neck, just above his collar. "Very good," he murmured, his lips dragging against skin and fabric. "Now." He took one of Poe's hands, and set it on the wall; he gave a nudge to the small of his back. The door hissed open. "Go report to your commander."

* * *

Poe might have found some privacy in his own bunk, one of six wedged into the shared crew's quarters (and one of four occupied on this journey), as the other men were on duty. But in a ship of this size, no one without a lock on his door could expect to go interrupted for very long. Taking a few minutes to compose oneself was a luxury not afforded to those not important enough to warrant one of the shuttle's primary passenger cabins, and he'd just left one of those - and didn't expect things to go _nearly_ as smoothly once he presented himself at the other one. He wedged himself for a few minutes into the bay of the secondary loading hatch, where at least there was a view: one small transparisteel port, currently offering an outlook on the dark, eerie, warping glow of hyperspace. 

He'd always been drawn to stars in his moments of contemplation. He hardly thought of himself as philosophical - but there was no easier to way to get at the sentiments, for him, that he considered necessary for a proper perspective on things. A man should have a feeling for the place he held. He should have an appreciation for scale, and for the reach of his own responsibilities and ambitions: it was important, sometimes, to feel small, and it was important, sometimes, to feel one breath away from expanding to the size of the unimaginable. Poe rarely doubted what mattered to him. Having been raised to it from his very first memories, he knew in his mind and in his heart that the wholesale salvation of the galaxy from injustice, chaos, corruption, and the tyranny of neglect was the only object he could ever pursue. He knew it - but he looked out into the stars and he _felt_ it in some other part of him, something he'd never heard tied metaphorically to some corporeal counterpart. There was no organ that was the allegorical seat for this sensation. It was duty, sized up to galactic proportions. He was a part of this - and so was charged to do right by it.

The stars were hidden, now. But he could imagine them, on the other side of the divide. A binary system, two luminous forms in concert and conflict, moving around their untouched barycenter, raging closer and spinning away, and never, ever arriving at the point that lay perfectly between them.

He checked his chrono, and then his face in the reflection of the loading hatch's port: all in order. He drew his lower lip into his mouth, hunting for the taste of Ren's kiss, his come. It was faint and faded, but it remained, one more stroke in his faceless portrait. Ren's caution still rang in his ears, of course: General Hux's regard for his own safety over the success of a mission wasn't a point he could appeal to and expect to make any headway. But if he could make his explanations, they could at least understand one another. Poe was resigned to the strain of being constantly in danger of losing what he held most dear, but to be scorned for it - that would have made it intolerable.

It was a quick walk to the shuttle's other primary passenger cabin: the command suite. He passed the lieutenant at the communications post, who gave him none of the usual collegial warnings that the general was in a mood or otherwise indisposed - so he touched the intercom, and he waited.

The response was immediate, preoccupied, flat. "Yes."

"Commander Dameron, sir."

He'd expected a pause - maybe even an outright dismissal. Instead, the door opened to him at once. Swallowing back the beginnings of trepidation, Poe went inside. He found the general seated at the desk beside the cabin's sizable viewport, a datapad lying before him emitting a slowly scrolling projection of some schematic Poe didn't recognize. A projection he didn't see fit to stop, apparently, simply because he had a visitor: it continued to slide by between them, insubstantial, faintly blue, a dizzying tangle of machinery. Poe stopped at attention; threw a salute.

"Ren told me to expect you half an hour ago," Hux said his eyes moving with the projection. His chin was rested in the palm of his hand, but his fingers drummed every so often - tense, sporadic.

That brought him up short. This wasn't how he'd wanted to begin this interview, worrying about whether he was meant to be keeping secrets. "Sir, I -"

"He _told_ me," he cut in, harsh, dropping his hand to the table and with it any pretense of insouciance, "that you went to ask him to intercede with me on your behalf."

"Sir, you wouldn't speak to -"

"Did I ask you a question?"

Poe's jaw tightened. All of the relief and optimism he'd harbored when he'd left Ren's quarters had melted well away. He didn't want to answer at all; he did anyway. "No. Sir."

"No. No, I wouldn't speak to you. I'd rather not be speaking to you now. But - here we are." He shoved the datapad off to one side of the largely empty desk, extinguishing the holo. "Because you saw fit to take your grievances to a man who had no business entertaining them. I cannot _imagine_ what made you think his appeal would help your case in the slightest, but then, I'm having a hard time understanding why you thought you could ignore my instructions in the first place, so - perhaps a little clarification is in order."

Poe leapt on that almost before the word _clarification_ had left Hux's mouth - question or no question. "Sir, I'd very much like to -"

_"Listen."_ His hand slammed down flat on the desktop with a sharp, stinging _slap_. "I know you can, when you choose to. Tell me: do you know where your obligations lie?"

The thought of being shunted into a series of strictly yes-or-no propositions was almost more than he could bear. He felt something in the side of his neck twitch. "Yes, sir." If it sounded reluctant and mulish, it was - he knew very well his answers were going to veer into unsatisfactory territory sooner rather than later.

"And where is that?"

"With you, sir." He said it quickly, and without hesitation - almost as though he expected to get away with it.

"No. Your obligation is where it's always been - it's precisely where you dropped it when you went racing off without my consent or approval, guns blazing, into a battle in which you should have had no part at all. Your obligation is to the First Order," he continued, his voice rising as he leaned forward until he gave up entirely on looming from his seat, and hauled himself to his feet, hands planted on the desk. "So the next time you check your pockets and you find you've misplaced your sense of duty, Commander, _look there!"_

His face was tight, intent with anger - but his hair was in unusual disarray, robbing him of some of his customary razor edge, and when he was stooped like this, bent more or less to Poe's own eye level, it was easy to read the rigidity of the angles of his body as tension and fatigue, not energy, not strength. It pained him to see it, it pained him like nothing else - and, judging by Hux's increasingly clouded expression, he was doing a poor job of hiding it. 

Best just to say it. It always was. If he'd had his way, he'd have been as much an open book to General Hux as he was to Kylo Ren. "If I thought I'd had a choice, sir," he said, low, perhaps too soft, "please, believe me: this wouldn't have been it." The last thing he ever wanted was to put that look on his face - to fail him. But, truth be told, he hadn't even thought about that when he'd made the choice to act, down on that moon. He'd seen a danger - he'd addressed it - that was all. Only later had the prospect of discord and displeasure and the inevitable guilt tied to insubordination appeared on his horizon of possibilities, a fog of dread still hanging distant over the water.

Hux hauled himself up, and turned to the viewport. His outburst had passed quickly, as they usually did, but the pique still pinched his features, still curled his shoulders inward. "You never have a choice, Commander. I don't know how much simpler to make it for you." Catching sight of himself in the glass, he pushed his hair behind one ear. "I don't know why I'm arguing with you at all."

_Because I'm right,_ Poe didn't say. There was no reason to actively try for a court martial.

"You are the First Order, sir," he said instead - which he understood, in many ways, was no less treasonous. "To me. To a lot of us." To most of the men, if he had to make his guess. His voice was as gentle and as measured as he could make it, as though he were delivering bad news. "I don't see how your safety can be anything but paramount."

"There's one for the log," Hux said, raising his eyes to the ceiling. "Commander Dameron is lecturing me about _safety."_

Stung, Poe dropped his eyes to the darkened datapad. "I'm not joking, sir."

"No - just wasting your breath, as usual." Hux came around the desk, stopping in front of Poe, and very pointedly not offering him an _at ease_. Squared up to his full height, he could look down his nose at Poe, and then some - but with his arms crossed over his chest, his chin ducked toward his breastbone, and his weight shifted to one leg, the impression was less imposing than conspiratorial. "Do you think I value my life insufficiently highly, Commander?"

Poe was silent; he'd already given his answer, and he was clearly about to be provided a different one.

"Oh - nothing to say? Well." Hux leaned in that much closer. His fingers were digging tightly into the sleeves of his jacket. "As it happens, I value it _very_ highly. I've gone to greater lengths than you would care to know, to make sure it gets home safely with me every time. Do you think I don't know - do you think _I_ don't know, that if I disappeared, this entire project would stand at least a fifty percent chance of dying before anyone in the Republic so much as knows our name?" His lips were pressed tight, thin and bloodless. "I know there are very, very few men I can trust to keep this going. If you think I'm marching out every day resigned to martyrdom, then please, for the love of whatever it is you hold sacred, get it out of your head. I don't want to die - I'm actually _quite_ reluctant. I mean to accomplish something. And I can't do that if my heart's not beating - _or_ with soldiers who think they know better than I do. It's hard enough when everything runs smoothly. I have more to do every day than a man can do in a week, and that's when it's going _well_ , and I can rely on men like you - and I do, I do rely on them to make things just that one infinitesimal bit easier, men who I know are intelligent, and have a genuine sense of duty, who I can turn my back on for two minutes at a time without having to worry everything will burn down." He seemed as though he might be about to say something else - but then his momentum left him, and the breath that remained to him came out in a burst of exasperation. "At ease, Commander. I'm tired just looking at you."

Poe dropped his salute. The rest of him seemed frozen in place, as locked and coiled as if he were expecting a blow. This had seemed so simple, when he'd been speaking to Ren - he'd made it so simple. He tried to find that kernel of truth again. "Sir," he said, his brow furrowing. "All I've ever wanted to do …" But he couldn't find the words, this time, to say what he meant. _All I want is to keep you safe._ It wasn't true, though - he wanted something more. _All I want is to give you everything you deserve._

"Do you want to ease my burden, Commander?" Hux asked, not unkindly. He rubbed the heel of his palm against his forehead, disturbing his hair again.

"Yes. Yes, sir."

"Then _obey."_ It sounded more like a plea than an order, an exhausted appeal to reason. He rested his hand on Poe's shoulder - and turned him gently toward the door. "And get me something from the galley. Are you hungry? Wait - what are you supposed to be doing?"

"It's my sleep cycle, sir." His relief at realizing he wasn't being sent away was intense - a second wind. Maybe they were similar in that way: they both needed something to accomplish.

Hux sniffed. "Mine, too. Whatever's hot. Be quick."

Whatever was hot turned out to be instant noodles, which boiled themselves in their cartons (with the help of an exothermic chemical reaction between the broth and the ambient air) on the desk while they worked. This wasn't the sort of labor Poe was used to, having never been anyone's aide; taking notes, plotting schedules, earmarking communications, and running through the finer details of a hundred different fields about which he knew next to nothing was a tedious blur that any other time would likely only have made him resent that _he_ had to do this, instead of someone in the department actually overseeing this stuff. He'd never wanted to be at the top - now he wanted it less. After a couple hours of this, all he'd gleaned was that there was something major in the works, a construction project of immense scale, including, among other things, a training center larger than any currently in use. He was glad when Hux finally decided to pause long enough to eat his dinner (which was, of course, no longer even remotely warm) - he felt a lot less ham-fisted digging around a box with a pair of chopsticks than he did listening to the general pivoting from subject to subject and trying to keep up.

He would have been perfectly content to eat in silence - expected it, in fact. That he was permitted to stay here and make himself (arguably) useful was enough for now, proof that he could eventually work his way out of the hole he'd dropped himself in. So when Hux spoke, Poe looked up with a certain wariness: he was pretty keenly aware that any conversation offered him another opportunity to put his foot in his mouth.

"When this project has been completed," Hux said, noodles dangling, forgotten, off his chopsticks, "it will be - difficult to overstate its importance to the Order." He was looking out into the twisting void of hyperspace, his chin in one hand. "But one of its most important features is that it will allow us to increase our manpower - we've never had the resources to devote this much space and this much talent to education. Training."

"Yes, sir." He slurped up another noodle. Better to stick to safe answers.

"Our men are the foundation of all of our efforts. All of them - our Stormtroopers, our officers. Everyone. They are the Order."

Poe was starting to feel like he was being set up for a question. "Of course, sir."

"And so it's essential, of course, that each of them should have an extremely clear understanding of what their responsibilities entail. Where their loyalties ought to be placed." He glanced back at Poe - who, fighting a sinking, morose feeling on being confronted with the same lecture he'd so recently heard in shouted form, was focusing most of his attention on eating. "There are … it isn't complicated," he continued, careful, feeling his way between his words. "But it can be a messy business. Like anything else that involves individuals. It has its unintended side effects. Some of them are - well, not entirely unsalutary." 

It had sounded, for a moment, as though General Hux was about to accuse him of the same delusion Ren had, of fabricating his devotion out of speeches and training modules - but he'd lost the thread, he thought. The man was being pretty oblique. So he decided, for once, not to jump to conclusions - to wait. Still, the twist of his mouth was sullen. "Sir?"

The look Hux gave him was chary, and slightly frustrated - disappointed, maybe, that he had to say anything more. "My duty is to the First Order, Commander, just as yours is. You understand?"

"... Yes, sir." _Not really, sir. You could try speaking Basic._

"Commander."

"Not really, sir."

"It isn't unusual for anyone to feel affection for his superiors. For the people to whom he owes his loyalty, and who in turn owe him a certain responsibility. It's part of the formula. It's how it has to be. Ideally - in any functional system - it's a reciprocal phenomenon. It must be mutual, or it becomes either tyranny, or disorder."

Now he felt like he was actually listening to a training module. "Yes, sir."

"I am _responsible_ for you," Hux burst out, clearly exasperated, his eyes narrowing again as he tried physically to get his point across the desk with a jab of his chopsticks. "I care for you a great deal. It sounds as though you can relate, so the next time you decide to go tearing off against orders, running your neck into every damned noose you can find, and you find them all, _don't_ you - if you can bring yourself to think of nothing else, do me a favor, will you, and try to think of _that."_ He whipped his chopsticks into the box - it skidded a few centimeters and nicked against the edge of the datapad, and came to a rather impotent, tottering stop.

And Poe understood, finally. He'd never felt so clumsy in his life - so miserably inept. What he'd said earlier to Ren came back to him like a bitter prophecy - every attempt he made to serve him backfired, an unwelcome disappointment. The general's impatience and displeasure were sharp enough to sting, but they were shallow, in the end; it was the deep, deep fatigue and gnawing anxiety underneath that made something in his heart crack. "I'm sorry," he said, low and uneven, after a long silence, sitting upright and staring down at a little splatter of broth. "I'm sorry I make you so tired."

Hux pinched at the bridge of his nose, shutting his eyes. "There's the non-apology I've been waiting for."

He couldn't stay here any longer. Poe shot to his feet, the chair clattering behind him; he managed, he was pretty sure, to choke out a _sir_ , and even in his haste made sure to grab the detritus from dinner, some pretense for making his exit. He was halfway to the door when he felt the hand on his shoulder - and he whirled around, running almost entirely on instinct in his dismay, to grab the general's wrist. He deposited his leaking stack of noodle cartons on a console table, where they proceeded to drip; a set of chopsticks tumbled to the floor.

"What do you want me to say?" He turned his face up to him, demanding. "I _am_ sorry. I'm not what you want me to be - I've never been more sorry about anything in my entire fucking life. You want me to say I'll stop? I won't. I _know_ my limitations. If I could change this, do you think I'd …" Searching for something, anything that might make him believe him, and coming up empty, Poe dragged the general's hand down to his breast, planting it flat over his heart. Like he was making some kind of pledge - swearing on someone else's life. His mouth flattened, miserable. "It's not," he hissed, "some _side effect."_

It sank in, of course, in the ensuing, empty beats, how very beyond the pale this was. He'd put his hands on him. With any other man, he'd have expected a slap to the face and a week in the brig - with the general, he should have been busted right down to ensign and shipped to a dead-end post so fast he didn't know what hit him. 

Instead … Hux's hand was rigid and reluctant on his chest, yes, but it lost some of its stiffness as his attention seemed to shift. His eyes fell to Poe's hand where it was clutching his own, and his face softened even as his eyes went just a little darker. "I wasn't entirely forthcoming with you, before," he said. "Because I didn't think it necessary. Or kind. But: Ren told me quite a lot." When he met Poe's eyes, there was no reproach in his expression - only gravity, and some concern. "I hope you understand that you are always well within your rights to clear any of his orders with me."

"He didn't order me to do anything." That Ren had told him everything was a relief - Poe wouldn't have kept it from him. "This is what I want." And maybe, just _maybe_ , it was what the general wanted, too; his words were difficult to parse, always bound up in terms of duty and propriety, but Poe thought he could feel it in the heat of his skin, and see it in the tightness around his eyes.

"It isn't done."

"What - are you afraid I'll get too attached? Disobey orders to try to save your skin?"

Hux didn't seem to find that amusing - but the point, Poe could see, had hit home. "Perhaps I'm concerned about the reverse." It was purely a contrarian argument - anyone could see that. He didn't even try to make it sound convincing.

"You're not. Neither am I." If it had ever occurred to him that Hux would sacrifice his cause for one man - none of this could ever have happened. Poe eased his weight onto the balls of his feet, manhandling Hux's hand a bit closer to the center of his chest, craning his neck to offer him his mouth. "Please," he breathed,

And if he couldn't have what he wanted - if it was beyond his power to keep him, to keep them both, out of harm's way - the concession he received, a press of his lips that was somehow both formal and faltering, tentative and hard - that was enough.

* * *

The bed shifted beneath his shoulder. The weight at his side moved away, sending him rolling slowly, sheet dragging at his ankles, onto his back. Poe's eyes were shut against the light they hadn't shut off, and he wondered whether he had fallen asleep, however briefly - he felt, somehow, that he'd been at Hux's side for quite a long time, just as he imagined he could feel him moving across the cabin now, the pull of him diminishing (but never disappearing) with every step he took as he eased back into his usual trajectory: work. Poe slid into the warmth he'd left, and breathed in, anchoring himself in the smell of sex and the same damn soap they all used. He opened his eyes, and his vision for just a moment retained the bleariness of first waking. The light gleamed in Hux's tousled hair like sun in old, scratched glass.

"You have another three hours," Hux said, when their eyes met as he turned to retrieve his trousers from where they were draped across his locker at the foot of the bed. "There's no need to get up."

"So do you." Three hours wasn't long enough to catch the sleep he was going to wish he'd had when he went back on the clock, but it was long enough for some things. 

Hux gave him a tight smile. "Wouldn't that be nice."

"You can bring it in here." He was going out to tend to that datapad again, Poe knew - and he should certainly have offered to help, whether it was his sleep cycle or not. He found, however, that he was extremely reluctant to climb out of bed. This tiny cabin, with its bed tucked away in its own room, was a luxury on a ship like this - it was a luxury on any ship, as far as someone in Poe's position was concerned - and he didn't like to waste luxuries. He liked, actually, to wallow in them until someone came and dragged him out. What could be better than a real bed, privacy, _and_ making sure that if Hux worked himself to the bone, at least he did it horizontally?

"I prefer to have quiet while I work, I'm afraid."

"I can be quiet."

Hux tugged on his undershirt, loose and white and thin; and he gave Poe a look, as he groped through his kit to find a comb. "I have to say, I haven't noticed."

He left for the other room, turning out the light on his way, and Poe shut his eyes once again with a smile. He lay there, balanced nicely between sleep and wakefulness, his mind and body both settling into a quiet stasis. The muscles in his back ached sweetly as they eased; with every twist and slide of his hips or his shoulders, he could feel the pull and drag and sting of where the general had been inside him, of the shallow, grazing abrasions his teeth and fingernails had left behind. He lay there that way, finding the perfect position to hold, the one that let him feel everything at once - until a foreign presence moved across his mind, brushing over the surface of all his pleasurable little twinges, like fingertips through a film of sugar, just stealing a taste; in its wake came curiosity, delight, approval. 

Poe sat up.

A moment later, there were voices on the other side of the door. He could hear enough of them to recognize - Hux's quick, flat phrases, the lilting depth of Kylo Ren. The words themselves were lost on him, dissolved into vagaries by the time they reached him where he waited, the sheet tumbled down around his waist. And he did wait, though he wanted very much to go out to them.

The door slid open a few minutes later, and Hux came in with his datapad, triggering the light; he glanced at Poe, but let him be, going instead to his locker to search through a box of discs. And then, behind him, in the doorframe -

Poe dropped his eyes to the bedding, gripped once again with that unhappy shock of having seen something one isn't supposed to see - but the face was already firmly pressed into his memory, dark eyes, dark, thick, slightly disordered hair, a generous mouth twisted into a strange half-smile … And he looked up again, meeting Kylo Ren's eyes and holding them, watching with a certain wonder as that smile spread.

Hux shut his locker, turning back to them - and paused, glancing from Poe's face and its expression of awed surprise, to Ren, and back again. He rolled his eyes, stuffing a disc into the datapad, and sat abruptly on the corner of the bed. "Honestly," he muttered. "You finally found someone who'd let you keep the mask on, hm? And all you had to do was dip into the ranks of junior officers …"

Ren ignored this; he came to stand beside Poe, slipping his hand into his hair, trailing his fingers gently along his scalp even as some other part of him slipped a bit deeper, skimming across his thoughts. Poe rose to both, his back arching slightly in an involuntary shudder of comfort. Ren smiled down at him. "I don't know why you make things so difficult for yourself, General," he said, still gazing through Poe's face - and then he sat, one hand still hanging in Poe's hair. "It makes no sense to me at all." Poe tipped his chin up to him, looking right back, waiting - and Ren kissed him, inclining his head a little as he did so, as though he were granting him a particular favor. "Good," he said, low and heavy between them.

"Here." Hux tapped on the datapad, and another projection leapt up into the air, no more comprehensible than any of the others had been. "This is your segment, as currently drafted. I don't see why you're so concerned -"

"Because it's _small_ , that's why."

"It isn't. It's massive. It's a shocking waste of space already. I know you deal in infinites, but as it happens, no one on your side of things has deigned to share those secrets with our engineers, so I'm afraid you'll just have to be satisfied with the limitations of the laws of physics. The _only_ laws, I might add, that you seem to think -"

"It isn't big enough. I've explained it to you. What was the point of that? So you could turn around and say _no?"_

"Yes. Yes, that's one possibility when you ask for something, believe it or not -"

"I never _asked_ -"

They went on like this, back and forth, grating on one another but never quite drawing blood, simmering but never quite boiling over. It was deeply strange, and not a little uncomfortable for someone who felt so strongly that his role ought to be to do his utmost for the both of them - until he realized that this, too, was a kind of intimacy. They could both raise absolute hell, he knew, he'd seen it - they were both capable of steering an argument straight for disaster, plotting a course for the center of a star and riding it all the way out. A full-on collision between the two of them would have been nothing short of cataclysmic. But they had a way of dancing around one another, it seemed - a system of orbits that allowed them to spin around one another, to draw close, to pull away again. It made sense that they'd have found this compromise. Who else, after all, did they have? Here at the very, very top, there was almost no one, and the burdens were so heavy, and the loneliness stretching out around it felt suddenly hard and impassible and vast, like dead, starless space, and he was so, so _sad_ for them -

"Shh." Ren's lips were at his ear; his finger pressed into the soft spot just above Poe's spine. There was amusement in his voice. "You think too loud."

"That's not all," Hux muttered, glaring up at the projection. After a few seconds, he glanced over at the two of them, his gaze settling on Poe. He seemed to study his face, searching for … what? Poe smiled at him, a reassurance: he was perfectly content.

That, it seemed, was the right answer. Hux tapped the datapad again, dissolving the projection, and he set it aside. "You're staying," he said. It was not a question.

"Of course," Ren murmured against the sweat-stiff hair at Poe's temple. 

And when the light was off again - when Poe was lying where the mattress sloped down to Kylo Ren's bulk, his chin buried in his lustrous hair, the other man's lips at his throat - when Hux slid in at his other side, having finally abandoned his work - Poe felt a little as though he were floating. He settled onto his back between them, steady, balanced in his own space. It was dark, aside from the glow of the control panel beside the door; the angles of the sloping ceiling were lost in the shadows of the room. So it was easy to look up, and to imagine the eternity that lay just beyond the hull, and to feel that his position in it was stable and enduring, that he both held and was held - an anchor and a satellite both. 


End file.
